Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekale, T. (2009), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2009.08621caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 21, Issue 3

The spring of 2009 promises to be full of events. In addition to various European projects and guest lecturing sessions, we will of course be attending conferences! We believe that the main conference for JWL this year will be the EAWOP conference in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in May. We attended last year – Sara has attended this conference for some years – and we believe that the EAWOP poster sessions are a very good way to find researchers and topics that would interest you. The other main event for our journal, Researching Work and Learning (RWL), also takes place in 2009, in late June, in Roskilde, Denmark, and we will aim to derive an RWL special issue again from this conference as we did last year. It is probably too late to relay details of research reports for this issue, which you will read in April, but the event itself is worth a trip for researcher networking. We will also attend the TIIM 2009 in Bangkok, Thailand, in June, eventually the CiNET in September in Brisbane, and some smaller events. All this for you, dear readers, but of course these are also learning opportunities for us!

Conferences are places for networking, and quite fittingly this issue seems to have acquired a ”learning in networks” theme. We have included Elise Ramstad’s article with a developmental evaluation framework for innovation and learning networks; the article of Lise Desmarais et al from Quebec on knowledge transfer on geographically dispersed action research teams; and Mats Holmquist’s article on interactive research and joint learning.

The fourth research paper in this issue is interesting for us methodologically, and also very timely because it supports our actions and thinking in our conference travels in 2009. Alison Fox and Robert McCormick have authored an analytical piece on how and what can be learned from professional events such as conferences, and how one would eventually go forward to analyse the learning that takes place in such events.

Finally, this issue also contains the final piece, at least for now, from our long-serving Corporate University Editor, Richard Dealtry. We would like to thank him for sharing his experience with us over the years, and wish him luck in his future projects.

Study the articles – attend the conferences – widen your research interests! This will in the end serve all mankind in better learning and knowledge transfer practices.

Sara Cervai, Tauno Kekäle